Donald J. Greiner

John Updike: The Literary Vermeer

H e was the master of the elegantly lyrical sentence and the precisely observed detail. Aware, he once remarked, that something fierce goes on in homes, he used his astonishing facility with language to paint the particulars of the middle-class domestic scene in the latter half of the American twentieth century. He became our literary Vermeer, the writer with the keen eye and the always appropriate though often unexpected word, the man who wrote the equivalent of the Dutch master’s “A Lady Waiting” and “Woman Holding a Balance.” In his hands, details were the giant’s strength. Celebrating the “graphic precision” of “Saint Vermeer,” he once vowed to see all the painter’s canvases “available in the world’s public museums” (“Why Write?”; “An Outdoor Vermeer”). The concluding sentence of his early story “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car” resonated throughout his observant life and what had seemed to be an ever expanding canon: “We in America need ceremonies, is I suppose, the point of what I have written.” The world for him was something to revere, a gift to love, a bride. John Updike (1932–2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, the only child in a family displaced by the economic disaster that stymied the nation in the 1930s. He could have been the poster baby for the “Greatest Generation,” his

John Updike and the Film Version of Rabbit, Run: Novel, Script, Movie

The film version of Rabbit, Run was released in 1970, a decade after the publication of Updikes controversial novel. Despite the widespread praise given to Updike during the decade (a National Book Award, best-selling fiction, a Time cover story), the film disappointed both general audiences and critics. The problem was the screenplay by Howard Kreitsek. Lost for four decades, the final shooting script surfaced in 2010. A discussion of specific scenes in the novel and of how Kreitsek transposed them in the shooting script to be rendered by director Jack Smight in the movie underscores why the film fails while the novel brilliantly succeeds.

“A Search for the Most Deeply Hidden Human Values”: Film Adaptations of Post-1950 Novels

From the inception of film as an art form, writers have been fascinated by its potential, its technology, its ability to represent in a different manner than with words alone, but somehow including words as part of its inherent functioning. The list of writers enticed by film is a long one, too long to enumerate here. And the fascination has not been a one-way street. Just as writers have been drawn to film—to write screenplays, to write about films, to include film in their fiction—so filmmakers have been drawn to novels—as a source for adaptation, its authors providing the potential for new ideas, and the like. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, wrote about film for the Argentinean literary journal, Sur. In one such review, of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Borges approaches the film by means of the two plots he isolates. His terms of comparison are literary: beyond plot and narrative strategies, he compares the film to the work of Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad (214–15). In the 1950s, Orson Welles tried his hand at novel writing, producing a novel, Mr. Arkadin (1955), which he adapted into a film of the same name. In both novel and film, Welles has the title figure tell stories; one most especially, of the scorpion and the frog, probes the nature of character as a literary (and human) quality (414). Writing about cinema in 1953, Cesare Zavattini (renowned Italian neorealist screenwriter) describes its relation to reality:

The "God Itch": An Interview with Janette Turner Hospital

Author Janette Turner Hospital discusses her work, including her upcoming novel Orpheus Lost.

The Public Burning, Coover's Fiery Masterpiece, on Center Stage Again

Abstract This issue of Critique is devoted to Robert Coovers The Public Burning; the idea for such an issue was initially conceived by Cririques executive editors almost immediately after we received word that Grove Press was planning to reissue The Public Burning (with a new preface by William H. Gass) sometime in 1998. This reissue was an important literary event for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that the novel had somehow remained out of print for nearly fifteen years. A massive, unclassifiable work of great power, thematic ambition, linguistic bravado, and savage, Swiftian satiric wit, The Public Burning had originally ken published by Viking in 1977.